The pilots were not their original pilots. That was the first thing that had gone wrong. The captain they had flown with out of Kansas City had picked up a sinus infection that turned his ears into two bags of cement on the descent, and he had gone sick at the gate, and crew scheduling had sent a reserve, a captain who had already flown an Omaha turn that morning and had been sitting in the crew room eating almonds out of a bag when his phone rang. The reserve captain had come down the jet bridge at 2:40 with his flight bag and his roller and his hat under his arm, and Billie had looked up from the galley and seen who it was, and something in her chest had gone small and careful, the way it does when you recognize a car in the rearview mirror.
"Billie Faraday," Gunnar Vossberg had said. "I thought they retired you."
"They keep trying. I keep coming in."
He had laughed, a short laugh, and shaken her hand with his left hand on her elbow, the way older pilots did, and then he had gone into the flight deck to get the airplane set up and had not come out again for twenty minutes.
She had known him for twenty-two years. Not well, the way you know people on an airline, which is all at once in bursts and then not for years at a time. He had been a first officer when she first flew with him, a big blond Minnesotan from Moorhead with a farmer's neck and a soft voice and an absolute horror of profanity that made the younger flight attendants try to make him blush. He had made captain in 2009. He was sixty-two now, three years from the mandatory retirement age, and he had thickened through the middle and his hair had gone from wheat to the color of dryer lint, but the soft voice was the same. She had flown with him perhaps forty times. She had liked him, most of those times. She had gone to his house once, in Parker, for a summer party, and met his wife, Sigrun, who had been a flight attendant at Western before Western was swallowed by Delta and who had told Billie, over a paper plate of Swedish meatballs, that the trick to being married to a pilot was to assume he was right about airplanes and wrong about everything else. Billie had laughed until she choked.
Sigrun had died the summer before last. Billie had heard about it in the crew room, from the bulletin board where the union posted condolences next to the notices about the dental plan. Acute myeloid leukemia. She had sent a card to the house in Parker and not gotten an answer, which was normal, and she had not flown with Gunnar since.
And there was the other thing, which was older, and which she did not want to think about today, and which she thought about anyway every time she saw his name on a trip sheet. Houston, April of 2016. A man in 3C. She put it away again. She had gotten good at putting it away.
At 2:55 they had done the crew briefing in the forward galley, the five of them standing in a space designed for two. Gunnar had done it the way every captain was supposed to do it since the airlines had learned in the 1980s, in blood, that crews who did not talk to each other flew airplanes into the ground. Names, trip, weather, flight time, turbulence, the security code word for the day, the procedure for the cockpit door. Who would come in when a pilot came out. He had said the words. He had said them right. But Billie had watched him while he said them, and he had called Amberly "Amber" twice, and when Tomasz asked whether they were expecting a ride through the line of storms over Kansas, Gunnar had looked at him for a full two seconds as though Tomasz had asked him in Portuguese, and then he had said, "Moderate chop. We'll go around the worst of it. Dariela's got the dispatch release," and turned to his first officer, who had said, smoothly, "Light to moderate over Hays and Salina, we've got a reroute north around the cells, I'll give you a call before we start down." Dariela Montes was thirty-four and had been at Bridgeline for six years and had the compact, unhurried movements of a woman who had flown Air Force tankers before this and had been yelled at by better people than airline passengers. She had looked at her captain while she talked. She had been watching him too.
Then the lightning hold, and the waiting.
At 3:40 the ramp tower lifted the hold, and the rampers came out of the bag room like birds after a hawk has passed, and the green duffel bag went up the belt loader and into the forward hold. At 3:44 the hold went on again. Over Watkins, the curtains of rain had reached the ground.